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To paraphrase Dostoevsky, one can measure the degree of civilization in a country by traveling its roads.
I learned this the hard way on a recent reporting trip to Finland. To catch my departing flight, first I had to rent a car to drive from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to Newark airport. Then, en route, not only did I have to deal with the usual stress of having to balance the risk of getting a speeding ticket against the risk of getting into an accident by driving too slowly, I also got to meet some deranged hooligans straight out of “Mad Max.” Perhaps 15 or 20 souped-up cars and trucks, with deafening glass packs and side-dump exhausts, appeared suddenly around Stroudsburg, driving perhaps 100 miles per hour, weaving between lanes and onto the shoulder. One of them abruptly cut me off, nearly causing me to crash into another car.
It’s a familiar experience for anyone who drives, bikes, or walks on an American street. Hyper-vigilance is the natural response to roads filled with big, heavy, powerful cars and trucks driven at high speed, and often by people with a contemptuous disregard for anything but their own convenience and kicks.
So when I got to Finland to pick up a rental car, I was still amped. It’s a foreign country, and getting to my hotel meant I had to drive through the middle of the capital city. Surely this would be difficult.
It was not. I was surprised to learn that driving in downtown Helsinki is actually quite easy and safe — and later as I walked around the city, so is walking, cycling, or riding an electric scooter. What’s more, most of the road design policies that have made it so easy and safe to move around, drastically reducing carbon emissions in the process, are relatively simple. Even a sprawling American suburb could adopt most of them, with great effect.
The first and most important policy is to slow down traffic in towns and cities. Finland does have high-speed highways, but the speed limit only hits 120 kilometers per hour (about 75 miles per hour) far outside any settlement and only during the summer. Elsewhere, limits have been progressively reduced over the years. In the Helsinki suburbs, a limit of 80 kph, or 50 mph, is enforced with speed cameras. Further into the city, as the roads pick up more traffic and become more complex, the highway speed drops to 60 kph (37 mph), or even 50 kph (31 mph). On local city streets, the limit drops to 30 kph (18 mph), and most streets are narrow and paved with rough stone that, together with raised crosswalks, effectively force people to drive even slower.
A Finnish speeding ticket, which is levied as a percentage of one’s income, is no joke. Back in June, a wealthy businessman named Anders Wiklöf was fined 121,000 euros for doing 82 kph in a 50 kph zone. “I really regret the matter,” he told a local newspaper.
Thanks to those stiff and all-but-guaranteed fines, people hardly ever speed, and as a result, driving is much easier and safer. You’ve got plenty of time to change lanes, react to other cars, and figure out where you need to go. It’s actually rather pleasant. Without the white-knuckle American road culture, you can actually relax and enjoy the driving experience, even in the big city.
Low speeds are also central to pedestrian and cyclist safety on city streets. People are driving so slowly that even if someone darts right out in front of a driver, there is still usually enough time to stop. And if a collision does happen, lower speeds are exponentially safer for everyone involved. One study estimated that the risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle at 26 kph (16 mph) was about 10 percent, but that increased to 90 percent at 74 kph (46 mph).
The second policy is to provide separate dedicated space for pedestrians, bikes, and public transit. Larger Helsinki streets typically have a sidewalk divided between a pedestrian section and a bike section, a lane for cars, and then a separated tram lane. This means less conflict between pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and trams — and critically, the trams don’t get stuck in traffic. That means they can bypass any traffic congestion, and so those who don’t need or want to drive will logically opt to take public transit instead, thus letting the car lanes breathe. On smaller side streets, low speeds mean the city can forgo controls of any kind. Many Helsinki intersections don’t have so much as a stop sign; people just have to watch each other and negotiate on the fly — and it works.
Taken together, all this helps create a culture of walking, cycling, and transit use that is safer, healthier, and more efficient. Thanks to these reforms, Helsinki cut its annual pedestrian fatalities from 84 in 1965 to zero in 2019 (though there have been a couple in the subsequent years). Nationally, last year saw the lowest number of traffic deaths ever recorded. Meanwhile, cutting down on automobile trips is part of how Finland slashed its carbon dioxide emissions per capita by about half, from 14 metric tons in 2003 to 7 tons in 2021, as compared to 15 tons in America.
It’s also just more wholesome. Once it sunk in that I was about as safe as it is possible to be on a street, and didn’t have to be looking over my shoulder every few seconds to watch out for a careening 4-ton pickup truck, I felt the sense of peace that comes from releasing a worry that has been there for so long you’d forgotten what it was like to exist without it. Rather than being perceived as some irritating interloper getting in the way of drivers, I felt that I belonged on the street as much as anyone else. Conversely, I started viewing drivers, who invariably stop when anyone approaches a crosswalk, as fellow human beings rather than probable speed-crazed maniacs bent on running me down.
This safety no doubt helps explain why compared to an American city, one sees children on the street far more frequently in Helsinki; either big packs of young schoolchildren wearing high-visibility vests, shepherded by a couple adults, or kids from about seven and up out by themselves or in groups. And that’s despite the fact that the American birthrate is substantially higher than Finland’s. No doubt part of the reason for children being absent from the street is America’s hyper-neurotic parenting culture, but that culture is also fueled by the quite rational worry that unsupervised kids will be obliterated by a speeding lunatic.
It all sounds pretty fancy. But I want to emphasize that Helsinki is not really on the urbanist cutting edge. It still has some wide “stroads” here and there, and compared to, say, Amsterdam it is still relatively car-centric. But that also means that it isn’t too far off from the American city average.
Now, of course America couldn’t simply copy-paste every one of Finland road policies. We have neither the political will nor the administrative capacity to impose six-digit fines on rich jerks speeding through school zones in their Porsche Cayennes. It’s also hard to imagine the kind of stiff taxes on vehicle ownership and gasoline (about three dollars a gallon) that also makes driving much more expensive.
But we could have automatically enforced speed limits. New York City, for example, recently turned its (very limited) collection of speed cameras on continuously, after long delays from car-brained officials. Sure enough, speeding fell sharply along with traffic injuries and deaths of all kinds. We could also reclaim some road space for bike lanes and trams — or even just buses. The average suburban arterial has more than enough space, and e-bikes make many bike trips possible even in low-density sprawl.
Studies demonstrate that a substantial and growing fraction of Americans want to be able to live car-free. Another larger fraction would simply like the option to avoid driving if they don’t want to. The reason so many don’t is the risk. Make walking and cycling safe, and millions more will do it. We wouldn’t make it all the way to Finland’s level without the rest of its policies, but we’d get fairly far.
When reformers propose Finland-style changes to American cities, drivers commonly complain that it would cut into their freedom. But you can still drive just about anywhere in Finland, if you want to. Indeed, it’s much easier and safer to do so than it is in American cities. We have about the worst of all possible worlds, where we’re so dedicated to car supremacy that we’ve made our cities a dangerous, stressful, polluted hellscape even for drivers. There’s a better way.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.